Memeorandum

May 03, 2011

Sending The SEALs - Gutsy, Or Forced By Circumstance?

As Obama enjoys his victory lap following the death of Osama bin Laden, his unrelenting critics can find grist for their mill in this AP tick-tock of the hunt and eventual raid:

By mid-February, the officials were convinced a "high-value target" was hiding in the compound. President Barack Obama wanted to take action.

"They were confident and their confidence was growing: 'This is different. This intelligence case is different. What we see in this compound is different than anything we've ever seen before,'" John Brennan, the president's top counterterrorism adviser, said Monday. "I was confident that we had the basis to take action."

Options were limited. The compound was in a residential neighborhood in a sovereign country. If Obama ordered an airstrike and bin Laden was not in the compound, it would be a huge diplomatic problem. Even if Obama was right, obliterating the compound might make it nearly impossible to confirm bin Laden's death.

Said Brennan: "The president had to evaluate the strength of that information, and then made what I believe was one of the most gutsiest calls of any president in recent memory."

Obama tapped two dozen members of the Navy's elite SEAL Team Six to carry out a raid with surgical accuracy.

As they explain, bombing an upscale suburb of Islamabad was not a live diplomatic option. That means the choices were a manned raid, or continued dithering while waiting for more intel.

But dithering may not have been an option either - it was just last week that Wikileaks dumped some info that can be pieced together to lead back to the compound in Abbottabad:

Buried in a document from 2008 released by WikiLeaks last week are notes from the interrogation of a Libyan, Abu al-Libi, who had apparently been with Bin Laden in Afghanistan.

According to the document, Libi fled to Peshawar in Pakistan and was living there in 2003 when he was asked to become one of Bin Laden's messengers. The document says: "In July 2003, detainee received a letter from [Bin Laden's] designated courier, Maulawi Abd al-Khaliq Jan, requesting detainee take on the responsibility of collecting donations, organising travel and distributing funds for families in Pakistan. [Bin Laden] stated detainee would be the official messenger between [Bin Laden] and others in Pakistan. In mid-2003, detainee moved his family to Abbottabad (Pakistan) and worked between Abbottabad and Peshawar."

Hmm - one would have presumed that Osama et al had thought through the implications of the al-Libbi capture. Would they really have first learned from WikiLeaks that al-Libbi might have been cooperating with his interrogators? Then again, maybe they had persuaded themselves that the trail back to Osma had gone cold. Still, seeing Osama's home base cited in a CIA memo might have re-opened an old debate at Osama's headquarters and reinforced a faction arguing that it was time to move on.

Tricky. I can imagine that advisors in the White House were very worried that these leaks would prompt the departure of whatever HVT was within the compound. And if it were subsequently leaked that Obama lost an HVT to WikiLeaks while waiting for more intel... one can ony imagine the pressures on the man with the loneliest job in the world.

READING THE BODY LANGUAGE: The Times describes the study of the bombing option:

Mr. Gates was skeptical about a helicopter assault, calling it risky, and instructed military officials to look into aerial bombardment using smart bombs. But a few days later, the officials returned with the news that it would take some 32 bombs of 2,000 pounds each. And how could the American officials be certain that they had killed Bin Laden?

“It would have created a giant crater, and it wouldn’t have given us a body,” said one American intelligence official.

I am just guessing that this option was prepared by a group that favored another course. 32 bombs?

HMM: Per the Times, the name of the courier mentioned by al-Libi was probably false:

After Mr. Libi was captured in May 2005 and turned over to the C.I.A., he too was asked. He denied knowing Mr. Kuwaiti and gave a different name for Bin Laden’s courier, whom he called Maulawi Jan. C.I.A. analysts would never find such a person and eventually concluded that the name was Mr. Libi’s invention, the official recalled.

Not to diminish the bravery of the SEALs, because everything they do is incredible, but this raid didn't shape up to the be the hardest on record. They knew only 4 males were on property and at least one of them (OBL) was a girlie man. The WH is putting out a bunch of smoke and mirrors on how long this took, but I think it was over in about five minutes. Sure, the in and out of Pakistan in risky as are potential boobytraps, but from Obama's perspective, the raid seemed like a fairly easy call--and a fairly safe one. Of course the MSM is hyping it as much as possible to make Prez nine-iron look courageous.

--Iggy, I was thinking of it more in making Assange a target of the head-choppers.--

Too late for that, CH. Cleo has already pronounced Assange responsible for the Arab uprisings which promise to expand the head choppers' power exponentially. On the whole not a bad trade off for 'em, if they're also inhabitants of cleo's alternate universe.

Obama's calculated the political blowback if the missed opportunity became known was greater than the political blowback from a failure mission. His overriding concern is always how any action will affect him, not what's best for the country.

American forces were led to Osama bin Laden by his most trusted courier, a Kuwaiti-born man named Sheikh Abu Ahmed, three US officials revealed.

Ahmed was a shadowy figure for US intelligence, someone it took many years to identify. For a long time, intelligence officials knew him only by his "nom de guerre", Abu Ahmed al-Kuwaiti.

The first indications about his significance came from CIA detainees shortly after the September 11, 2001 terrorist attacks.

Ahmed and his brother were killed in the same pre-dawn raid on Monday that left bin Laden dead.

... and ...

The [WikiLeaks] file suggests that the courier’s identity was provided to the US by another key source, the al-Qaida facilitator Hassan Ghul, who was captured in Iraq in 2004 and interrogated by the CIA. Ghul was never sent to Guantanamo but was believed to have been taken to a prison in Pakistan.

He told the Americans that al-Kuwaiti travelled with bin Laden. The file states:

“Al-Kuwaiti was seen in Tora Bora and it is possible al-Kuwaiti was one of the individuals [al-Qahtani] reported accompanying UBL [bin Laden] in Tora Bora prior to UBL’s disappearance.”

The only calculus Obama made was whether having the intel and doing nothing ala Clinton and having the military leak it would be more damaging than doing a raid and having it fail. The calculus of actually doing a good thing for the country by getting OBL never entered the equation.

Real leaders lead at great cost to themselves, he ain't no real leader.

Wait a second, lyle; was Shrum actually presenting the Bay of Pigs as a positive thing? I knew he was an idiot from his sterling Presidential campaign record, which Duke and Duke can only regard with unfettered admiration; but this puts him in Ed Schultz fractured history tales territory.

If that's what Shrum said, my guess is that he meant to refer to the Cuban missile crisis, in which the media portrayed JFK as having the combined virtues of the Holy Ghost, the Twelve Apostles and El Cid.

You're probably right, DoT; I was thinking that when you were posting it. Yeah the MFM fluffing was pretty disgusting; leaving aside that he almost got us all blown up, JFK sold out the intermediate range missiles in Europe and Turkey. Fortunately in the long term, the latter didn't make a difference.

Wapo bump due mainly to war on terror approval up. No change in other areas. Terrorism will not be Top 3 issue in 2012 election.

Wapo:
"In the immediate aftermath of the targeted killing of Osama bin Laden, President Obama’s approval rating has jumped higher, with big increases in the number of Americans giving him high marks on dealing with terrorism and the situation in Afghanistan.

But the new poll, conducted Monday evening by The Washington Post and the Pew Research Center, also finds virtually no movement in Obama’s numbers when it comes to handling the economy. That suggests that success on one front — even one as important as the death of the mastermind of the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks — might not translate easily to other areas.

Overall, 56 percent of those polled say they approve of the way Obama is handling his job as president, an increase of nine percentage points over April polls by Post-ABC News and Pew. "

"Bush got an identical 10-point boost among independents in December 2003 [Hussein capture]. For Bush, that lift proved short-lived, with the entire increase gone within six weeks."

If terrorism is a big issue due to another attack, does the capture accrete to the benefit of Obama or not?

ISTM that the capture is incidental in the WOT and that the policy decisions that are made and continue to be made is the sticking point. If the administration keeps leading through weakness and undermining the war and Holder keeps doing stupid things, the errors of the dems are highlighted in big honking neon and ongoing terrorism is a fatal blow to dems.

If, however, they follow the GWB footprints and marginalize the Kucinich's and the far left fringe, it is a big issue, but any new terror attacks don't hurt the dems. By usurping GWBs decisions when convenient, it seems to me that the terrorism issue is blunted vis a vis the election as they can point and say we did x and ignore their historical record. I don't see the republicans gaining much traction in saying 'let's change teams even though they are doing what we did.'

Now, if the dems continue in their stupid policies, all hell will reign on them.

What I'm worried about is their appropriating and using the WOT to undermine capitalism and liberty to continue the long march. If we get another attack, there will be calls to 'do something,' and I don't trust this lot to 'do something' without it also benefiting them politically. Think Citizens United in a WOT context. Never let a crisis go to waste.

Geography class at UCLA, predicted with 88.9% certainty that OBL was hiding out in Abbottabad, Pakistan. LUN

Well, not quite that accurate. Per the original article (LUN):

"According to a probabilistic model they created, there was an 88.9% chance that bin Laden was hiding out in a city less than 300 km from his last known location in Tora Bora: a region that included Abbottabad, Pakistan, where he was killed last night. "

So they narrowed it down to an area of 282,744 square kilometers or 108,686 square miles.

“If we had the opportunity to take him [bin Laden] alive, we would have done that,” said John Brennan, national security advisor to the president. But as they had thought might happen, bin Laden resisted, a fire fight occurred, and because of the administration’s determination to not “put our people at risk,” bin Laden was killed.

Thus far the oaf Brennan has had two revisions forced upon his account: Obama was in fact unarmed, and no woman was used as a shield.

The former point makes no difference at all to me, nor do I care one whit whether the SEALs' orders were to kill on sight or to capture if possible. Unless the guy immediately prostrated himself with his hands behind his back and started begging for mercy, he was gonna get shot anyway. Can you imagine being in a dark room with a psychotic mass murderer and giving him the benefit of the doubt?

I don't care if he was armed or not. As someone pointed out yesterday, he needed killin' and I'm pleased as punch my SEALs did the killin'. Panetta says neither he nor Obama saw the killin' so odds are Brennan didn't either. Our counter-terrorism chief in action, so to speak.

Why is the media calling the Abbottabad OBL compound a "mansion?" Yeah, the walls for privacy took up a lot of space, the actual house structure not so large. The house inside, as Clarice indicated earlier this morning, looks like a dump. In one of the bloody room photos, there is a wooden daybed with ratty, holey, yellowed foam rubber. Who started all this "luxury" nonsense?

I notice in the ABC film clip what appears to be a bunch of medicine and prescription bottles on top of a shelf or dresser. Wonder if that was OBL's bedroom?

Panetta says neither he nor Obama saw the killin' so odds are Brennan didn't either. Our counter-terrorism chief in action, so to speak.

Obama is such a sissy, he can't even make a decision to release a photo of bin Laden's corpse. Gates and the military must have had to drag him kicking and screaming into that situation room as the attack went down.

The numbers that are being bandied about imply that there were 3 men and 19 women in the house. If that is even approximately correct, "hiding behind women" is not an unreasonable characterization of the situation.

The story of UBL’s end appears to keep changing. Now, UBL’s wife didn’t die, they got the name of the dead son wrong too. It even appears that UBL didn’t have a gun, but was “putting up resistance”. What did he do ? … attack the Seals with a pointy stick ?? .. a banana ? Did the Seals gun down US public enemy #1 like a common dog ? This is getting worse than the “Jessica Lynch” urban legend.

Call was thinking of Jake--that a man who had ridden with them so long could let such a thing happen. Of course he was outnumbered, but it was no excuse. He could have fought or run, once he saw the caliber of his companions.

Carney also said the photograph of bin Laden dead is "gruesome" and "it could be inflammatory" if released.

The White House is mulling whether to make the photo public, but he said officials are concerned about the "sensitivity" of doing so.

Let me get this straight. According to the MSM, Obama has big brass ones because he decided to go ahead with the raid. But now he can't decide what to do with the photo, because he's concerned about
being "inflammatory."

Seems to me that killing a guy has to be more "inflammatory" than releasing a photo of a guy after you've killed him.

So which is it - is Obama brave or not?

The only way to resolve the apparent conflict is to conclude that Obama just does what his advisors tell him to do. They already told him to sign off on the raid but they have not yet made the decision as to what to do with the photo.

I didn't watch the miniseries under a standing order to see nothing I've read, but you make me reconsider.

You should watch it just for Robert Duval. And Tommy Lee Jones hasn't done anything better than his portrayal of Call. The rest of the cast is outstanding as well. Only watch the original; every subsequent sequel and the prequel (although I think McMurtry was involved with that, as he was the original) are substandard.

True story: I taped it without even watching it when it was first broadcast strictly by luck because a buddy of mine recommended it and I just programmed my vcr to record it automatically. I let it just sit for a couple months and, on a whim, started watching it at 10 on a Saturday night. I stayed up until 2 am watching the first 3 episodes and then got up at 7 and watched the final episode; after which I immediately started watching it again. And again.

Weren't we told Obama nixed the option of blowing up the compound because he wanted irrefutable proof OBL was dispatched? And after Dems/msm vilified Bush non-stop for eight years, Obama expects the public to accept without question a "the DNA matches" WH press release? I guess anyone who asks to see evidence it was OBL is a racist "proofer".